2006: Uncle Vong

All my life, I had heard stories about Vong. “When Vong was here he had such a hard time getting used to the food,” my Granni would say. “He missed his fish sauce. In Vietnam everybody eats fish sauce.” Granni always emphasized the “everybody” when she told the story. “It’s like ketchup for us, you know,” and she would laugh at the memory of herself way back in 1962, a suburban California housewife trying to figure out how to feed the first Vietnamese foreign exchange student at Willow Glen High. “All the girls, they just thought he was fascinating,” she went on. “So exotic. But Vong was too shy to ask them out so I would get on the telephone and call them myself. Pretty soon we didn’t have to worry about what to feed him anymore… those girls would fight over which one got to invite him over for dinner.”

I knew that my grandparents had not heard from Vong after the war, but we never talked about what might have happened to him. He had ties to America, and people with ties to America did not fare well in the newly unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam. It was possible that his connection with our family had caused him trouble. No-one wanted to speculate about what that might mean. In April 1975 the American and other foreign embassies evacuated. Saigon fell to the VC. Vong tried to leave the country on a small fishing boat but, as he puts it now, he was lucky to get caught. Countless Vietnamese died trying to sail away on small boats that were fine for fishing local waters but unseaworthy for traveling long distances in the open ocean. Vong spent ten years in a re-education camp before being released, penniless, to rebuild his life.

He tried to contact my grandparents in California, not because he thought he might ever see them again – travel outside the country was not permitted – but because he knew his American mom and dad would have worried about him and he wanted them to know he was OK. Working through relatives who had settled in the US, Vong looked for phone numbers and put ads in Willow Glen area newspapers. When he finally got permission to go to the US for a vacation nearly twenty years later, he spent part of his trip going to the old house where he had lived with them during his year as an exchange student. He and his wife, Huong, went door to door asking the neighbors whether they knew what had happened to the Andrews. But by then my grandparents had long since moved to Carmel and no one in the old neighborhood remembered them.

My grandparents would periodically try to find Vong as well, but before doi moi, the Vietnamese version of economic openness that began in the mid-1980s, it wasn’t easy to get information about people in Vietnam. They never quite gave up, though. One night my aunt decided to try using the internet. She typed his name into a search engine and just like that, there he was. There was someone with his name, at least, running a tourism and hospitality school in Ho Chi Minh City. Could it be their Vong? “Why didn’t we think of doing this before?” Granni asked. By the following day, she was on the phone with Vong catching each other up on the last forty years. My grandfather had died by then and Granni was in her nineties. Vong didn’t want to miss the chance to see his American mom again so he applied for permission to visit ASAP and they had an emotional reunion at Granni’s home in Carmel.

I met them the following year on their second visit to Carmel, just as I was putting my nomad plan into action. My things were in storage and I had made arrangements to stay with one of my flight students for a few months. I had announced that I would be taking the Fall off of work to travel, but I hadn’t decided yet exactly where I wanted to go. “To see the leaves change in New England, maybe,” I said. “But I don’t really know.” It had never even crossed my mind to go to Vietnam, but that was exactly the kind of adventure I had wanted to be open to. So when my long lost uncle Vong and his gracious, elegant wife invited me to visit them in Vietnam I didn’t even think about it. “What a great idea,” I said. “I’d love to.”

Just like that. In the morning Vietnam was not even a thought, by nightfall it was a plan, and now it is a reality. I am here and Vong and Huong have already taught me to like fish sauce just like my Granni taught Vong to like ketchup more than forty years ago in the suburbs of San Jose, California.